Google Updates and SERP Changes - November 2020

[RedBar]

The following 11 messages were cut out of the October 2020 thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5011839.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton



My numbers are in for Occtober 2020:

Global B2B Melded Sites October v September 2020 +8.68%

Melded Sites October 2020 v Sites 1+2 October 2019 +418%

The last week of October was much quieter with, seemingly, no SERPs changes. I am expecting lower traffic levels during Npvember and December.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 2:51 pm (utc) on Nov 2, 2020]
[edit reason] split thread to new month [/edit]

[renatovieira]

@arfmedia

I think it depends on the way they are built.

[mzb44]

About backlinks: a member in this discussion reported the site has hundreds of high-quality backlinks and nothing happened in terms of results.

Are you referencing my post by chance?

If yes, then don't forget that in that case the site was negatively affected by the May core update. It seems that the May update is potentially "freezing" sites to approximately where they were during the update, even if you made changes afterwards. The new changes could potentially be taken into account whenever a new update is released.

[ichthyous]

I have developed hundreds of sites since 1999. In my humble opinion:

Backlinks - 85%
Quality Content - 10%
Page Score - 5%

I would have agreed before the May update. After the May update backlinks took a major hit. My site has accumulated many excellent backlinks since May...major news outlets, articles, and very high ranking partner sites. It has not moved the needle at all. What I see is that very large corporate sites took over the top spots and also a lot of long-form content (articles, blog posts) took over the searches completely that used to be dominated by ecommerce pages. Some of these sites don't have a strong backlink profile, but suddenly their articles were ranking above everyone else. I moved to increase the content on my pages, but that also drags on load time, which has become another major factor.

[ichthyous]

Ah yes, if you have two good days where traffic is zooming you are going to pay for it. Today at 2:45 my USA traffic is down 34%...

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - Exactly what happens to me! I had an excellent week, all of a sudden................ today traffic is gone :-\

[webdev29]

@ichthyous @renatovieira 100% same here, few great days then goodbye conversions.+ a lot of indexation problems....boring

[Athedian]

Definitely got hit by a Core Vital penalty right now. Page ranking tanked completely due to page speed issue which I've already instructed our team to fix months ago. Conversion totally died. And traffic was all spam and useless because Google deemed our site was horrible therefore didn't deserve good traffic sources.

[AdrianRozic]

Funny things are happening for me since May.
I am running 40 niche sites and one big blog.
Niche sites are doing pretty ok, mostly Images traffic and they lost 15% traffic each, I remember few other times when I lost 25+% but recovered over years.
But my blog thats one of my main income sources, my main traffic page is one of my articles where Im getting most of my sales, one of 3 websites online thats covering this niche, and my site was ranked 1-3 on the 1st SERP since 2014, never lost a front page ever, site is 10000% whitehat never built any forced backlinks, I have 200 backlinks from people mentioning me on their sites, domains is 8 years old with 100% unique quality content thats actually useful, average visitor is staying on my site 8-10 minutes, scrolling through 3 pages on average, bounce rate 36%. 4 months ago, Google deindexed my main article from Google, not from my webmaster, just dissapeared from SERPs, just my main article all other articles are fine, and they left my competition on 1st abd 2nd spot. Ok, I thought its some bug, or my site is slow, tested my site, its a long article with many images and videos, 4s pageload speed, oh, I thought thats too much, should be under 1s. So I checked my competition that took my 1st spot on SERP, their pageload speed is 14.5s, some indians running this useless website, they are posting 3 articles per day for the last 1 year and have thousands of useless articles 200-500 words with stolen images from Google, they even took some of my articles and changed words and ranked better than me lol.
Then I noticed something, some countries could see my article on SERPS, for example Canada, Thailand, Germany and Turkey, no one can explain why it dissapeared for some countries only.

[AdrianRozic]

part 2:
Last month my article appeared again, traffic was even better than before (not as good as 2015-2018) but ok, traffic was there, problem is, traffic was some type of zombie traffic because Google ranked my article for some irrelevant keywords, for example if I am running a Blog about best computer shops in Florida, Google would rank my site for: "Florida computer jobs" or "best computer shop in Las vegas", crazy! So I started getting traffic, but 0 conversion. Few weeks ago, google started ranking some spam image sites on the first page, sites are made using some automation script that would pull images from Google and just add caption on them, they would pull for example Apple product photos and add captiobs like "florida apple store" and they would rank first for that term with their spam image generator site. Their site got 1st and 2nd spot on serp, Amazon was 4th abd 5th with some useless books on computer repair, irrelevant for people looking for computer shops, and 6th result was pinterest with some irrelevant computer images, 7th result was my competitor with his spammy blog with 15s pageload speed, I was moved to page 2 of SERP and I was still getting tons of visitors because people are using page 2 more than ever because of irrelevant page 1.
It was ok until yesterday when Google totally removed my article from SERPS again, crazy.
I have 10 employees working for me and I dont really know what to do.

[MayankParmar]

Lost 70% of traffic since November 10 :(

[nmbrsk]

I’ve been focusing on Core Web Vitals pretty much ever since it was announced.

Is anyone struggling to get their sites up to scratch?

My website loads within 3 seconds, and has scores of 95%+ on GTMetrix.

But running it through PageSpeed Insights, the desktop scores comes to around 70-90, but the mobile score is anywhere between 20 to 40.

My biggest issue is with the metrics not adding up to what Chrome’s own DevTools says or any other site analyser. My LCP in Search Console is around 3.00, but when running it through DevTools, this shouldn’t be any higher than 2.00.

When I run the page through PageSpeed Insights, the LCP - especially for mobile - comes in at 8-10 seconds. Which is ridiculous since the largest visible div is loaded through “loading=eager” and is the first thing to fully paint every time the site loads. The page itself doesn’t take any longer than 3 seconds to load, so why is the tool reporting such a high figure? Especially when nothing else matches up to it?

Feel like if I don’t get this resolved, my keywords will continue to tank on mobile (down 80% this year whilst desktop has increased) and I’ll be banished into oblivion come May.

Any ideas?

[SnowMan68]

Something significant appears to have rolled out around 7am EST in the US. Anyone else seeing increase or decrease to normal hourly Google referrals?

[StupidIntelligent]

@SnowMan68 - If it were significant, Danny would have pressed the tweet button.

[SnowMan68]

@Stupidinterlligent. Haha. Right.....

[SnowMan68]

Worst case a test. Seeing knowledge graph results in a category that removed almost all of them pre election. I had a suspicion they would be back post election.

[NeapTide]

SERPs are highly volatile and results are greatly fluctuating for past several days. I am seeing results from sites moving up and down, disappearing and then reappearing and so on.

By the way in the Google history of 20 years, 2020 is the first year when I am seeing very good results on page 2. Often time I get what I am looking for on page number 2. So why is Google still sticking to its ancient approach of just displaying 10 results on first page? It's the high time they should increase search results to 20 - 25 without the need of hitting that "More Results" button.

It seems like no body from Google reads any suggestion from users on such forums anymore.

[AdrianRozic]

Why not some infinite load instead of pages, you get to the bottom of the page, you get more results

[topaz]

Mueller doesn't know whether there'll be a core update this last quarter.
[youtube.com...]

[MayankParmar]

They made my life miserable without core updates. I'm down to "07" impressions from 500K-700K impressions since November 10. Still can't believe they decided to kill my site a few days before the most important religious festival of my life. Heartbreaking.

[StupidIntelligent]

@MP - Was your site your livelihood, or a side project?

[mzb44]

Seems like he's implying probably no update this year? Makes kinda sense. They will probably delay it to January earliest.

[mzb44]

Also, MayankParmar, I don't think it's healthy to put this much hope into core updates. There are zero guarantees that whatever the last core update did to your site will be undone by the next update.
I'm not trying to discourage you or anything like that, I just don't think it's a good idea to depend this much on a single Google algorithm update.

Perhaps you should try creating several more sites, all using different types of strategies, so that if one update penalized one particular type of site you will still have other sites that rank.

It's a bad idea to rely on one site and then hope a Google update will help you. If the next update will not fix your site then will you be able to wait again 8-10 months for the next one after that to maybe then fix it?

[MayankParmar]

@StupidIntelligent side project but still important.

@mzb44 I am not hit by any core update. In fact, the last three core updates worked in my favour with little improvements. The problem is the sudden drop in News/Discover/Chrome suggestions traffic starting November 10/9. It's literally zero, which never happened before. It's a news site and it'll eventually die without news traffic.

I have thousands of backlinks to my original news work and the site is trusted in the niche. I'm not sure what they want me to do. Original content? Done. High-quality regular backlinks from Forbes, USAToday, BusinessInsider, etc? Done.

[RedBar]

Things look completely "normal" in my widget sector, seemingly unchanged SERPs yet traffic is below average.

Since there is no where else to ask this question, how are others finding DDG as a user these days?

I've used it for years however this last few months it has, for my searches, become a lot less accurate and especially so when using United Kingdom it has become much worse. Would I be correct in thinking it has become more USA-centric?

Or is it just me?

[MayankParmar]

Current traffic after the November 9/10 update/bug: [imgur.com...]

[mzb44]

The problem is the sudden drop in News/Discover/Chrome suggestions traffic starting November 10/9. It's literally zero, which never happened before. It's a news site and it'll eventually die without news traffic.

I see. This seems to be in the general trend Google seems to follow for a while now. They want to rank mainstream and highly authoritative sources for most content. This is especially important for YMYL and News sites.

I have thousands of backlinks to my original news work and the site is trusted in the niche. I'm not sure what they want me to do. Original content? Done. High-quality regular backlinks from Forbes, USAToday, BusinessInsider, etc? Done.

Yes, but are you a major mainstream and known organization or publisher? Unless you are a big mainstream and verified organization with a good reputation, you will likely not rank for these kinds of searches the way you did in the past.

This is just how things are these days and I don't really think it's going to change.

So, if you are a one man or small operation then perhaps it makes more sense to focus on smaller and more targeted sub-niches, rather than mainstream stuff like news, medical, technology, finance, etc. Those niches are by design dominated by major institutional sites, gov sites, universities, orgs, etc. It's not a "bug" or a "glitch" that will be fixed during the next update. Things work like this on purpose and seem to be working very well (hence no core update for 6+ months).

[MayankParmar]

I am not competing with mainstream sites. I am in computing tech news niche and my competitors have DA of 60-80 on Ahrefs (I have 70) and I understand if the traffic drops partially, but zero clicks impressions are just odd.

[mzb44]

Then I don't know what to say. Did you post your site here by chance? Maybe there is something technical you are missing but someone from here could detect.

[Dooku]

@Mayankparmar, you may not be competing with other websites, but other websites are possible competing with you in a not very ethical way.

Also, in the current situation with G it's very hard and getting impossible to run an information website for one person or small outfit. Not to devalue your website, but it's just not itsfoss.com or similar, and G knows this. G isn't willing to distribute useful traffic to to every website out there any more for "free".

[RedBar]

I know and use MP's site, it's easy enough to find, it's a great site for the subject and there's nothing evident wrong with it.